“Don’t be too persistent, it’s annoying, counterproductive,” the patron had admonished him when he contracted for his services. “A turn or two in front of each competitor’s, and away … alleyoop … off to a new spot.” Pollo began to run, far from the Place Saint-Sulpice, far from the smoke and the stench and that contact; but there was no escape; the smell from Saint-Sulpice was stronger than any other; the odor of grease, of burned flesh and fingernails and hair stifled the remembered perfumes of flowers and tobacco, of straw and wet sidewalks. He ran.
No one will deny that in spite of an occasional slip our hero basically is a dignified man. The awareness of that dignity caused him to slow his pace as soon as he saw he was approaching the Boulevard, where, unless everything had changed overnight, the usual (for the last thirty-three and one half days) spectacle awaited him.
He tried to think by which street he could with least difficulty reach the church, but they were all the same; down the deserted rue Bonaparte and rue de Rennes and rue du Dragon, he could see the compact mass of heads and shoulders on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the crowd lined up six-deep, some perched in trees or sitting in the temporary stands they had occupied since the previous night, if not before. He walked along the rue du Dragon, which was, at least, the farthest from the spectacle itself, and in two long strides had overtaken the owner of the Café Le Bouquet walking toward the Boulevard with his wife, who was carrying a basket filled with bread and cheese and artichokes.
“You’re late,” Pollo said to them.
“No. This is the third time this morning we’ve gone back for more provisions,” the patron answered condescendingly.
“You two can go right up to the front. What luck!”
The patronne smiled, looking at the sandwich boards and approving Pollo’s fidelity to his employ. “More than a right. An obligation. Without us, they’d die of hunger.”
“What’s happened?” Pollo would have liked to ask. “Why are two miserable tightwads like the two of you (that’s the truth, I’m not complaining) going around giving away food? Why are you doing it? What are you afraid of?” But, discreetly, he limited himself to a “May I go with you?”
The owners of the café shrugged their shoulders and indicated with a gesture that he could accompany them through the ancient narrow street as far as the corner. There, Madame placed the basket on her head and began to call out: “Let the supplies through, make way for the supplies,” and the patron and Pollo forced a path through the festive multitude jammed between the house fronts and the police barricades set up along the edge of the sidewalks.
A hand reached out to steal one of the cheeses and the patron clipped the scoundrel on the head: “This is for the penitents, canaille!”
The patronne, too, rapped the joker on the head. “You! You have to pay. If you want a free meal, join the pilgrims!”
“That really tears it!” Pollo muttered. “Did we come here to laugh or cry? Are we dying or being born? Is it the beginning or the end, cause or effect, problem or solution? What are we living through?” Again reason proposed the questions, but the film of memory, swifter than reason, rolled back in time to a cinema in the Latin Quarter … Pollo walking with his employers, carrying their supplies along the rue du Dragon … Pollo remembering an old film he’d seen as a child, terrified, paralyzed by the meaningless profusion of death, a film called Nuit et brouillard (fog, the smoke from the Place Saint-Sulpice, the haze pouring from the vulture-guarded towers), night and fog, the final solution … cause, effect, problem, solution.
But now the spectacle burst before his eyes, interrupting his pensive, nostalgic, fearful mood. Circus or tragedy, baptismal ceremony or funeral vigil, the event had revived ancestral memories. All along the avenue, people were decked out in peaked Liberty caps that protected their heads from the sun; there were tricolor ribbons for sale and assortments of miniature flags. The first row of seats had been reserved for a few old ladies, who, quite naturally and in respect to certain well-known precedents, knitted ceaselessly, commenting on the groups passing before them, men, boys, and young children carrying banners and lighted candles in broad daylight. Each contingent was led by a monk wearing a hairshirt and carrying a scythe across his shoulder; all of them, barefoot and exhausted, had arrived on foot from the diverse places identified by their gold- and silver-embroidered scarlet banners: Mantes, Pontoise, Bonnemarie, Nemours, Saint-Saëns, Senlis, Boissy-Sans-Avoir-Peur. Bands of fifty, a hundred, two hundred men, dirty and unshaven, boys who could scarcely drag their aching bodies, young children with filthy hands, runny noses, and infected eyes, all of them intoning the obsessive chant:
The place is here,
The time is now,
Now and here,
Here and now.
Each contingent joined the others in front of the Church of Saint-Germain, amid the hurrahs, the toasts and jokes of some, the sepulchral fear and fascination of others, and the occasional scattered, drifting choruses repeatedly singing the stirring La Carmagnole and Ça Ira. Antithetically and simultaneously, voices demanded the gibbet for the poet Villon and the firing squad for the usurper Bonaparte; they advocated marching against the Bastille and the government of Thiers at Versailles; they recited chaotically the poems of both Gringore and Prévert; they denounced the assassins of the Duc de Guise and the excesses of Queen Margot; paradoxically, they announced the death of the “Friend of the People” in his tepid tub and the birth of the future Sun King in the icy bed of Anne of Austria. One cried, “I want a chicken in every peasant’s pot on Sundays!”; another, “A marshal’s baton in every knapsack”; over here, “get rich”; over there, “all power to imagination!”; and one, a sharp, ululating, anonymous voice drowning out all the others, shouting obsessively, “O crime, what liberties are committed in thy name!” From the rue du Four to the Carrefour de l’Odéon, thousands of persons were struggling for a favored spot, singing, laughing, eating, wailing, embracing, pushing, exhausting themselves, joking among themselves, crying, and drinking, while Time flowed into Paris as if toward a roaring drain, and barefoot pilgrims took each other’s hands to form a double circle before the church, an enormous circle whose extremes touched, to the north, the Gallimard bookstore and the Café Le Bonaparte; to the west, the Deux-Magots; to the south, Le Drugstore, the Vidal record shop, and the Boutique Ted Lapidus; and to the east, the church itself, towering and severe. An escaped prisoner and an Inspector of Police timidly raised a heavy metal manhole cover, could not believe what was happening before their eyes, and disappeared again, lost in the black honeycomb of the sewers of Paris. A tubercular courtesan watched with languor and disillusion from behind the closed windows of her high-ceilinged apartment, closed her curtains, lay back upon her Empire couch, and in the shadowy room sang an aria of farewell. A young, slim, febrile man, dressed in a frock coat, top hat, and nankeen trousers, strolled along, indifferent to the throng, his attention fixed on a piece of skin of wild ass shrinking upon the palm of his hand.